Robert harris

There's nothing more interesting than the details of someone's life.

If you go back, 'The Great Gatsby' would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.

I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.

It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.

It's when you've stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you're asleep, that the real work is done.

Everyone thinks politics will just go on the way it is. I don't agree.

If one tries to think about history, it seems to me - it's like looking at a range of mountains. And the first time you see them, they look one way. But then time changes, the pattern of light shifts....

My greatest regret as a writer is that I've never been able to include as many jokes as I'd like.

In a way I'm almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.

History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.